Читать книгу YEARNING FOR HEAVEN - Irmgard Hetterich - Страница 5

What I learned

I am a Christian and was taught the teachings of Jesus and the Old and New Testaments. When I was a child I spend many years in a private Catholic school until 10thgrade. In elementary school I had nuns as teachers in different classes but one nun from the third grade was like a mother to me. Her name was Sister De Salles and I often talked to her after school. Many years I visited her after class and in the fourth class I was so religious that I went to church very often. I wanted to be a nun. She gave me a relic of a holy person and a small book of the New Testament that I still have after so many years. The most important thing that I learned from her is that God doesn’t necessary want me to give up my life to become a nun. She said I can have a normal life and spread love into the world. I can have a family and children and be a loving woman. I don’t need to become a nun to prove my love for God.

In those years my thought was to do a good deed every day and I imagined an invisible ladder that brought me closer to heaven with every good deed I did in my life. I am ascending this ladder every day as long as I live when I do good things. Naturally when I did something bad I saw myself going back down a step on my imaginary ladder.

For me heaven was somewhere in the sky but this thought cannot be reasonable because up there is the universe. So where is it? Also the teaching of the Judgment Day when all the souls will stand before God and be judged for their good or bad deeds is very real in my mind. I’ve seen some drawings which help my imagination to develop a picture of how it could be. But where would this take place? These are questions which are hard to answer but there has to be something/ somewhere in space or time where the souls will be for all eternity and near God. Or is that only a thought?

It is hard with our sense of time to think of something existing eternally. We need boarders, some kind of limit where something ends. Can you imagine a universe that keeps expanding and has no limit, no end? And how can we imagine a face for God? That is impossible.

I learned that people who believe in Jesus and God will never die and have an eternal life in heaven. Our bodies are only an instrument on earth and our soul is invisible and will leave the body to ascend into heaven. But if you are an evil person you will descend into hell, where you will have constant pain because there is a hot fire. It is better to be a good person and be rewarded with pleasure and peace than to be a bad person and be punished with a terrible fire. It is sometimes not so easy to believe all you hear in church but in my life I have always tried to be a good person.

I think that such teachings are extreme and something in between would be better for children of today. But it is definitely important to teach children the difference between good and bad so that they at least try to live a good life and do good deeds. When you hear the news today about young aggressive people you wonder if they exist only of evil thoughts and have no good in them. But not all are so then it seems as if there is a new movement toward doing good things and being religious.